Brain Fertilizer

All you need is a decent motorized treadmill.

What you do is choose the time you want to run for a certain distance. If you want to, say, run two miles in 13 minutes, you set the treadmill speed for a 6:30 mile. Obviously, your goal should be realistic. If you are 60 years old and 70 pounds overweight, a 5-minute mile is not an advisable goal. Be smart, because dumb choices are your own responsibility.

If your treadmill has an incline function, set the incline somewhere between 1.5 and 3, since running on a powered treadmill is somewhat easier than on a flat, non-moving surface.

Start running. Run as far as you can at the pace you want to reach. It really doesn't matter if you can only run a quarter-mile or half-mile at that speed before collapsing. When you run next, whether the next day or the day after (but don't go more than 48 hours without running if you are serious about improving your run time), you should try to go at least a little bit farther. When you can't run any more at that speed, drop the speed down to a pace you can maintain and finish out the distance.

You won't see much improvement the first few days. But if you run every day, you should meet your goal within 2-3 weeks, depending on the distance and desired goal of improvement.

This method works because the treadmill trains your legs, lungs, and body to go at a certain pace. You become conditioned to that speed and will do it automatically even when you don't have a powered surface moving beneath you that forces you to maintain the pace. If you slow down while running on a track, nothing happens except that you slow down...and your body doesn't get the chance to learn to maintain that pace. But if you slow down on the treadmill, you immediately feel yourself drifting away from the console, and can adjust your pace again to keep up. Even more importantly, if you don't speed up again, you actually will fall off the treadmill and possibly hurt yourself. That's a nice little reason to keep up the pace, eh?

If you decide to try this, let me know how it goes for you.